The HGC was very popular and became a widely supported de facto display standard on IBM PC compatibles.

The Hercules Graphics Card was released to fill a gap in the IBM video product lineup.

These adapters were quickly found to be inadequate by the market, creating a demand for a card that offers high-resolution graphics and text.

[3] The founder of Hercules Computer Technology, Van Suwannukul, created the Hercules Graphics Card so that he could work on his doctoral thesis on an IBM PC using the Thai alphabet, impossible with the low resolution of CGA or the fixed character set of MDA.

[6][7][8] Nominally, the Hercules card provides a horizontal scanning frequency of 18.425 ± 0.500 kHz and 50 Hz vertical.

[9] It runs at two slightly different sets of frequencies depending on whether in text or graphics mode, providing a different vertical refresh rate and a different aspect ratio via a different pixel clock and number of scanlines.

[13] Popular IBM PC programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet,[13] AutoCAD computer-aided drafting, Pagemaker and Xerox Ventura desktop publishing, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0 came with their own drivers to use the Hercules graphics mode.

[19] The Hercules Graphics Card was very successful, especially after Lotus 1-2-3 supported it, with one-half million units sold by 1985.

[22] It was an enhancement of the HGC, adding support for redefinable fonts called RAMFONT in MDA-compatible text mode.

It retained the same two modes (80 × 25 text with redefinable fonts and 720 × 348 graphics), and was backward-compatible with software written for the earlier monochrome Hercules cards.